The story was originally called All-American Detectives, which was meant to sound like a comic book (I was probably thinking of Detective Comics, which was a comic featuring Batman, and is also where DC gets its name).

However the editors of JukePop Serials thought it was too generic. The Case of the Syphilitic Sister is meant to sound like a ‘hardboiled’ detective story.

In The Hobbit, the ring that Bilbo Baggins finds was originally ‘only’ a magic ring of invisibility. However, as Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, he changed it to the corrupting One Ring that we’re familiar with.

This was one reason why he made some changes to The Hobbit; specifically to the chapter ‘Riddles In the Dark’.

I recently came across a page which compares the revised version of this chapter to the original. It’s here.

The Noble Spices have the ability to purify the air, and thus drive away miasma or the so-called Miasma Elementals.

This may be done by burning the spices – creating smoke – or by boiling water in which the spices have been placed – creating steam. The smoke is more powerful, but the spices will be used up in a short time.

One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.